The Christmas party
One of the perks of working at a Hedge Fund in London is the Christmas party. Dayna’s work had their Christmas party before mine but it didn’t sound too enticing the way Dayna described it. Something along the lines of “It’s at a crap bar in Croydon and they only pay for your first 2 drinks”. Either way we opted to just go for the Hedge Fund Christmas party this year.
My work organised a coach to pick most of us up from Central London (outside Madame Tussauds to be exact…which, excuse me for going off on a tangent, but I just do not understand why people go to this place – fake, creepy looking wax statues of famous people? No thanks, you would have to pay me to go).
Anyway, we then crawled our way through London traffic out to Hertfordshire and our mansion-y hotel in the countryside. The last part of the ride got pretty interesting as our angry bus driver swore his way through the narrow English lanes that were most definitely not built with a large bus in mind.
The theme for the night was Masquerade/Venetian black tie so I opted for the funniest/cheapest mask I could find and Dayna picked up a slightly nicer yet still cheap Venetian themed one.
I think they worked out OK. The bow tie part of the suit I hired not-so-much. After about 10 minutes of playing with the thing we decided that yes it was in fact missing a part (it was a sort of clip on one). After another 20 minutes we (Dayna) finally managed to secure it well enough (a hair clip was involved) so that we could finally go down for drinks.
After a few drinks and a lot of double kissing/European style greetings (still getting used to it) we had a little photo shoot with the night’s official photographer. He was good fun –it felt like Austin Powers was taking the photos (“Yeah baby, that’s perfect, looking nice, just like that!”).
The rest of the night was a blur of great food, tasty wine, vodka luges at the ice sculpture/drinking device, and awesome music (there was a really cool live band and the DJ wasn’t that bad either). It’s nice working at a place with such a fun, diverse bunch of people so that definitely helped too.
I could talk about the next morning and how much fun the bus ride home was (it really wasn’t) but better to just finish with some more photos from the night I think!
I think they worked out OK. The bow tie part of the suit I hired not-so-much. After about 10 minutes of playing with the thing we decided that yes it was in fact missing a part (it was a sort of clip on one). After another 20 minutes we (Dayna) finally managed to secure it well enough (a hair clip was involved) so that we could finally go down for drinks.
After a few drinks and a lot of double kissing/European style greetings (still getting used to it) we had a little photo shoot with the night’s official photographer. He was good fun –it felt like Austin Powers was taking the photos (“Yeah baby, that’s perfect, looking nice, just like that!”).
The rest of the night was a blur of great food, tasty wine, vodka luges at the ice sculpture/drinking device, and awesome music (there was a really cool live band and the DJ wasn’t that bad either). It’s nice working at a place with such a fun, diverse bunch of people so that definitely helped too.
I could talk about the next morning and how much fun the bus ride home was (it really wasn’t) but better to just finish with some more photos from the night I think!
[jetpack-related-posts]
